On 13-14 February 2025 the IIJ completed the Training for Somali Practitioners on Countering the Financing of Terrorism – the first IIJ CFT programme to take place in East Africa.
The training brought together 16 practitioners representing the Financial Reporting Centre of Somalia, the National Intelligence and Security Agency, the Judicial Training Institute, the Attorney General’s Office and judiciary, with representatives of the Somali Police Force joining online.
The focus of the training was on building the capacities of Somali CFT practitioners to mitigate existing and emerging terrorist financing risks in the country, including those associated with underregulated sectors of Designated Non-Financial Businesses and Professions (DNFBPs), virtual assets, mobile money and informal money transfer systems, as well as at improving interagency and public-private cooperation in CFT.
In the course of the training the participants discussed good practices suggested by a team of facilitators from the United Kingdom, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, and benefited from expert interventions from the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (UN CTED), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Inter-Governmental Action Group against Money Laundering in West Africa (GIABA) and private companies working in the field of non-banking money transfers and blockchain.
As a result, the participants formulated institutional-level action points aimed at improving Somalia’s CFT framework. These next steps included suggesting provisions for the draft AML/CFT law regarding regulation of virtual assets and the DNFBP sector, taking steps to improve international and regional cooperation by Somalia integrating into the FATF system and joining the Egmont Group, and conducting sectoral risk assessments for non-financial sectors that were identified as priority due to the apparent underestimation of risk levels.
The IIJ looks forward to continuing to work with Somali authorities and to support them in increasing the resilience of their CFT system.
